The Science of Selling
Harry Frisch, Founder, Sales Technology International Publishing (USA)
Michael Bang, Director, International School of Sales (England)
Harry Frisch is a highly celebrated author, Master Business Consultant, successful entrepreneur, an expert inthe field of human communication and behavior, as well as a multi-award winning Sales Professional. In hishighly successful sales career, he has solda remarkably wide range of products and services to all levels of business and industry, as well as retail to the public. He has worked with such companies as CBS,Honda Automotive, General Motors' Saturn Division, ReMax Realty, and The City of Los Angeles. Mr. Frisch received his Bachelorof Arts degree from Boston University and did his graduate work at Hunter College in New York City and at The University of Michigan.
The innovative five-step system of selling, as presented in Mr. Frisch’s book, HOW TO SELL – Clear andSimple,forms the basis of the popular sales workshops being delivered to tens-of-thousands throughout theworld, including inRussia and Kazakhstan, by the renowned International Sales Trainer, Michael Bang.
Mr. Bang's seminars have been delivered throughout the world to the staff of such major companies as Panasonic, Heineken, Nestle, Whirlpool, Toyota, Renault, Volvo, Land Rover, Toshiba, Unilever, Karcher, Megaphone, MTS, Sberbank, and Ural Airlines. The salespeople, sales managers and sales trainers who attend these seminars not only get the lift in inspiration and motivation they are seeking, but additionallyreceive thelong-lasting benefit of having their sales statistics stably uptrending. This is as a result of their being exposed to and trained in an actual technology of selling. Mr. Bang can be contacted for more information at info@InternationalSchoolofSales.com .
Ever since man first began to exchange goods and services with his fellow man, giving birth to the concept of "The Salesman", salespeople have somehow miraculously managed to keep business alive and flowing, equipped only with an odd assortment of hit-and-miss tools and a persistent determination to get the job done.
Unlike many other divisions and activities of the business world, such as Finance, Inventory Control and Quality Assurance, which are generally regarded as a "science", the world of Sales has been viewed as more of "an art". This is primarily because there has not been sufficient agreement on what the true basics of selling are actually made up of. There are almost as many schools-of-thought on "how to sell" as there are sales department managers. As a result of this lack of basic agreement, the field of sales has been cluttered with many inaccurate tools and inconsistent principles, which, when randomly applied, often lead salespeople into a "No-Sale, dead-end" rather than into a successfully closed, profitable sale with a happy customer.
Few fields are less well understood or more filled with false beliefs than the field of sales. But what if it turned out that the art of sales wasactually made up of a harmonious set of essential basic components? And what if these components had been identified and named? And what if the components turned out to be quite simple and easy to understand and apply? And what if they were organized into a "system of selling" that allowed the sale to be developed step-by-step, in a way that consistently led to high volumes of profitable sales, as well as to customers whose expectations were regularly exceeded? And what if these components were organized into a system that showed the salesperson how to persist and prevail through any and all sales resistance that his customers might throw at him during the sales process, and showed him how to persist and prevail in such non-offensive ways that he would actually enhance and strengthen his relationships with his customer, rather than weaken and harm them, while still closing his sales in high volume? What if you had your hands on such a marvelous set of reliable tools and principles which would consistently produce high volumes of profitable sales and happy customers? … What you would have your hands upon would be "The Science of Selling"!
The actual ingredients that spell success in sales can be and have been named, and are being taught and mastered every single day in countries all over the world, including right here in Kazakhstan. "Super Salesmanship", the name of the world’s most effective system of win-win selling, encompasses the following basic principles:
· A sale is made up of five distinct steps which follow one another in a particular sequence.
· All sales "objections" or concerns can be divided into two, simple categories:
· those that can be handled with "communication alone" and
· those which require an "actual real-world handling".
· Objections can be made to dissolve out of the way of the sale by the application of the simple, non-offensive "Four-step-system" for handling any and all sales objections.
· The salesperson can gain and retain control of the sale with a single, easy to apply technique, at any and all points during the sale.
The Five Steps of a Sale
While each of the five steps of a sale are very well known in the world of selling, the logic of how these steps can relate to and depend upon one another had never before been fully understood. By viewing these steps from a new perspective, and deepening one's understanding of the relationships between the five steps of a sale, even the most experienced of salespeople will find his or her ability to control the sale notably enhanced and his ability to make the sale instantly improved.
Simply put, a sale is a process of steps which begins by finding someone to sell something to and ends with that person buying what you are trying to sell him.
Each of the five steps of a sale, when executed effectively, lays the foundation upon which the next step can be securely built. The earlier steps should ideally form the solid base upon which, ultimately, a smooth close can be developed, allowing the salesperson to get a firm commitment and make the sale.
The five steps of a sale are:
· Prospecting – Locating a potential buyer.
· Opening – Getting the prospect into open, trusting communication.
· Qualifying – Discovering relevant data about the prospect’s needs and wants, and about his readiness and ability to buy.
· Presenting – Enlightening the prospect about the product or service in ways that assist him to develop strong interest in acquiring it.
· Closing – Getting the prospect’s firm commitment to acquire the product or service, with all applicable paperwork signed and finances finalized.
Each of these steps depends for its success upon the earlier steps being in place. The second step of a sale has to have the first step in place in order for the second step to be properly and stably erected. The third step needs the first and second steps in place for the third step to properly occur. And so on all the way up to the fifth and final step, Closing, which needs all of the earlier steps in place to stably support it.
This is the sequence a sale would ordinarily need to follow in order to predictably do what it is supposed to do… result in a sale!
A View from the Rear
Somewhere along the way, I discovered that the easiest way to grasp the logic of this sequence is, believe it or not, to view the sequence backwards!
So, let's take a quick backwards look at a sale, starting with where it ends (with a firmly committed prospect) and work our way back to where it begins (finding someone to sell something to).
The process in reverse
Step 5 – Closing
What you are ultimately striving for in the sales process is to make the sale, to "close" it, to get a firm commitment from the prospect. This would be his solid agreement, in writing where applicable, that he will acquire from you whatever product or service you have been offering to him, with monies fully in place.
Step 4 – Presenting
However, before you can expect him to firmly commit to acquiring your product or service, your prospect would first need to somehow be introduced to it (to learn about it, be told about it, perhaps be shown it, maybe get to experience it). He would need to be "presented" it. And he would need to be presented it in such a way that he understands it sufficiently to see the value and benefit of it to him – a value and benefit at least equal to the price you are asking him to pay for it.
Step 3 – Qualifying
Before you can meaningfully present how the features of your particular product will be of proper value and benefit to him specifically, you must first learn from him what it is about him and his needs and wants that this particular product might satisfy for him.
And similarly, before you can effectively strategize your campaign of exactly which of your wares to present and how soon and how intensively to present them to this particular prospect, you had better learn what his readiness and ability are to experience and acquire whatever it is that you are selling. This discovering of his relevant needs, wants, readiness and ability is the "Qualifying" step.
Step 2 – Opening
Now, before you can hope to get your prospect to tell you anything about anything, you've got to first get him willing to communicate with you. And before you can get him to truthfully tell you about himself and about the needs, wants, and limitations of his life, you’ve got to get him to at least have some basic trust in you. Establishing this communication with basic trust is the "Opening" step.
Step 1 – Prospecting
And before you can even begin to get anyone into any kind of communication with you at all, you would, of course, first have to locate him! Locating someone to sell something to is the "Prospecting" step, and where the sequence of your sale begins.
Does this all seem a bit "too simple"? So simple that it hardly needs to have been stated? Well, truth is like that sometimes! It can be staring us right in the face, but until something or someone directs our attention onto it, we often just don't quite see it. A salesperson will be able to control a sale to the degree he or she understands this process and the principles which underlie it.
Sales Objections
Objections can be slight or substantial, frail or formidable and can come at you in every form imaginable.
One of the biggest mistakes a salesperson can make is the mishandling of an objection that has been offered to him by his prospect. Instead of dealing with it in a fashion that would simply reduce or eliminate it out of the way of his sale, he reacts to it, slapping it back against the prospect, trying to overwhelm the objection by attacking it – and the prospect along with it.
Wrong way:
Prospect: "Yes, I really do want to buy it… but I get very uncomfortable when it gets right down to making a decision."
Salesperson: "That’s foolish. This is not that big a deal. The whole cost is less than $500! There's nothing to decide. Just pick up the pen and sign the contract."
Such an antagonistic response to an objection is not only abrasive to the prospect, it is a highly risky thing for the salesperson to do. It tends to unravel the very fabric of which the salesperson-prospect relationship is woven and thereby tends to undermine the sale itself.
In trying to close the sale, the salesperson should never need to resort to techniques that resist and argue with the objection.
If in the salesperson's Opening and Qualifying, he has truly discovered his prospect's key needs and wants; and in his Presentation, he's created a very real connection between those key needs and a product's ability to satisfy those key needs, he will have put himself in an excellent position to dissolve away any sales objections that might show up at the close, and to dissolve them away in a manner that is friendly and supportive.
The process that makes this so possible is the simple and highly workable Objection Handling Formula. This four-step formula, once studied and understood, equips a salesperson to non-offensively reduce and eliminate objections out of his path.
The names of the steps in the Objection Handling Formula are:
1. Clarify
2. Acknowledge
3. Handle
4. Forward
The power and simplicity upon which the ultra-workability of these steps is based, like the Five Steps of the Sale itself, are derived and firmly founded upon the very laws that underlie and regulate human interaction itself.
One of the greatest secrets in all of sales and selling is the answer to the question: "How does one continue to persist to try to get the prospect to say ‘Yes’ after he has already said ‘No’, without at the same time severely antagonizing and upsetting the prospect?" The answer to this question is in the exact details of when and how the salesperson should use the extremely powerful tool of "Acknowledging" the prospect's objection before attempting to persist forward.
For eons, a salesperson's success depended upon his "sixth-sense" and his hit-and-miss ability to "feel his way along" in the Art of Selling.
Now, for the first time, gliding high upon the waves of modern technology, a salesperson can avail himself of the consistent, predictable, reliable tools of "The Science of Selling".
© 2005 by Sales Technology International Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
The powerful technology of selling, as introduced above, is fully revealed in the new sales training manual, HOW TO SELL – Clear and Simple, by Harry Frisch, based on the works of management expert and educator, L. Ron Hubbard. This easy to read and understand book is available in English at www.HowToSellClearAndSimple.com, by emailing CustomerService@STIPublishing.com, or by calling (001) 727-466-6515 in the USA.
Table of contents
Will Kazakhstan Become a Developed, Well-off Country? Yuri Shokamanov
The Oil and Gas Industry: A Year's Auspicious Beginning Editorial Overview
Subsoil Use in 2004: Investment Statistics Elvira Dzhantureyeva
Changes in Kazakhstan’s Local Content Rules for Oil Operations Abai Shaikenov, Anthony Cioni
Oil in the CIS: Economic and Sovereign Rating Implications Special Report of Fitch Ratings Agency
Bogatyr Access Komyr: Investing into the Future Dennis C. Price
Power Industry: Regional Export Potential in Central Asia Loup J. Brefort
IPO: Russia's Experience and Kazakhstan's Outlook Askat Ospanov
New Opportunities in Kazakhstan's Real Estate Market Oleg Batratchenko
Eight steps to launching a brand, the PR way Al Ries, Laura Ries
How to Efficiently Manage a Business Mark DeEulio
Putting Together A Statistical Management System Klaus Hilgers
The Science of Selling Harry Frisch, Michael Bang
All People Are Different Fatima Chapkhaeva
